Three Stooges government?

“Healthywealthy” by threestooges.net. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb via Wikipedia

No, this post is not an attempt to personally disparage the folks running North Carolina government. Rather it is an attempt to conjure up an image that captures the impact of the decisions that state leaders have been inflicting of late on their brethren and sistren at the local level.

As some readers will recall, The Three Stooges[2] were an outlandish and slapstick comedy trio that had a long run in the middle part of the last century. In one of the trio’s recurring bits, one Stooge (usually Moe – pictured on the left) would slap or punch the second Stooge, who would then, in turn punch the third member of the group. The third and most hapless Stooge would then turn beside him and find that he only had thin air to punch.

Sadly, this comedy bit pretty well captures the essence of what’s going on in North Carolina government right now: Whether it’s the McCrory-Pope team or the General Assembly that starts the punching, the ones left flailing at thin air are local governments.

The bottom line is that the overarching policy of the current conservative state leadership when it comes to local government is this: We’re all for local control that’s closest to the voters — except when we’re not (i.e. any time anyone at the local level even thinks about doing something — like raising taxes to provide essential public services — with which we disagree). SLAP!!!

[3] the bill under consideration in the state Senate during the waning days of the 2014 session: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.orgncpolicywatch.com/2014/07/21/tax-proposal-would-put-local-governments-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place/

[4] alter some of the the impacts of the bill last evening: http://www.wral.com/senate-eases-local-sales-tax-restrictions/13829190/